麻豆约拍

Zora Neale Hurston. You might not recognise her name. She was an African American novelist and folklorist and a queen of the Harlem Renaissance.

But when she died in 1960 she was living on welfare and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her name was even misspelt on her death certificate. Scotland's National poet Jackie Kay tells the story of how Zora would later become part of America鈥檚 literary canon.

Alice Walker wrote in her collection of essays In Search of Our Mother鈥檚 Gardens, 鈥淲e are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.鈥�
And that's what Alice did: travelling to Florida in search of Zora's grave where she laid down a gravestone declaring Zora "A Genius of the South".

That was in 1973. Now Zora is claimed by many of America's leading novelists including Maya Angelou, Zadie Smith and Toni Morrison, as their literary foremother.

Eighty years since the publication of her greatest work Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jackie Kay tells Zora's story.
Interviews include author Alice Walker, the poet Sonia Sanchez and Zora's biographer Valerie Boyd.
Readings by Solange Knowles.

(Photo: Briana Reed (R) of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater during dress rehearsal of Uptown, with a picture of Zora Neale Hurston projected as a backdrop. Credit: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)